DOCSLIB.ORG

Lord Strathcarron, Chairman, Unicorn Publishing Group—Written Evidence (FOJ010)

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Lord Strathcarron, Chairman, Unicorn Publishing Group—Written Evidence (FOJ010) Lord Strathcarron, Chairman, Unicorn Publishing Group—written evidence (FOJ010) House of Lords Select Committee on Communications and Digital: inquiry into the future of journalism 1) How should journalism be defined and what is its value to society? What is the difference between ‘citizen journalism’ and other forms of journalism? The way in which journalism is practiced is such a fast moving feast that any definition is almost immediately out of date. Broadly, it means the gathering of any form of information, or the formulation of an opinion, by one person and the dissemination of these by that person to a wider audience. Its value to society is directly related to its quality. A well-informed public is better able to form collective decisions than otherwise, thus keeping those who govern less able to deceive them; on the other hand, a public fed on a diet of journalistic bread and circuses only attracts more bread and circuses and so more bad governance. Citizen journalism, a kind of guerrilla journalism, is open to anyone who wants to practice it; it could be said that every Twitter user is a form of guerrilla journalist. It occurs when those previously on the receiving end of information chose to spread the news themselves. As more or less anyone can set themselves as a citizen journalist, it’s a crowded market and so the more successful ones entertain as well as inform, often visually on YouTube, so giving us infotainment. It’s not hard to foresee that guerrilla journalism in all its spreading forms will soon overtake traditional journalism as consumers find one trusted source for news or opinions and, like a favourite bar or restaurant, frequent that one alone. This is already happening in an area of journalism where I am particularly involved at the moment, critical reviewing, especially if one includes bloggers on YouTube. 2) How have digital technologies changed the consumption of journalism? I can best comment as a consumer, I’m sure typical of the trend as a whole and certainly of other people in the media I work with. The answer is ‘totally’. I subscribe to half a dozen magazines and two daily newspapers and consume them all digitally. I don’t suppose I buy an actual newspaper more than once a fortnight. Additional to this is all the news we now download through social media, which is editorially a totally new form of marketing-led journalism. Print runs have halved in the last decade and by the end of the next decade it’s hard to see any printed news at all. Having gone from paper to screen, the consumption of journalism has been completely changed by the phenomenon of clickbait. Outlets such as BuzzFeed and HuffPost derive nearly all their advertising income from the proceeds of clickbait and journalists are specifically encouraged, in fact instructed, to write their copy to encourage clickbait. Clickbait is a particularly pernicious form or advertising. 3) How can public policy improve media literacy, particularly among those who have a low level of digital literacy? If ‘media literacy’ in this context means the ability to differentiate between the different types of media and ‘digital literacy’ is that part of media literacy received via the internet and smartphones, public policy has a part to play in encouraging digital awareness and safety. It could and should be possible to make all social media users identify themselves; at a stroke this would put an end to trolling. There are transnational problems insisting on this, but various carrots and sticks could be brought to bear. Additionally, in the same way that alcohol and gambling danger awareness programmes are paid for by the related industries, digital platforms could be ‘encouraged’ to do the same. But unlike with alcohol and gambling, the digital message could be positive too. 98% of the digital output is creative and beneficial; it’s the tiny rogue element that gives digital a bad name. 4) How have digital technologies changed the production of journalism? Do journalists have access to the training necessary to adapt to the digital world? As an editor, the biggest change I have noticed is in productivity. On the one hand, traditional media no longer have the budget to employ sub- and copy editors, let alone proofreaders, on the other hand dictation software means that a journalist can submit multiple times more copy in any given period of time than before. For example this whole paragraph has been dictated in the same amount of time that it has taken you to read it. I’ve just checked, and it’s right first time full stop (only joking). Clickbait, as mentioned above, has changed the production of journalism enormously on those outlets that require advertising rather than subscriptions to pay for themselves. About the training, I don’t really have enough knowledge to comment productively. 5) What qualifications do professional journalists need? How could public policy better support non-degree routes into journalism? The qualifications needed are directly related to the issues being reported on. It’s a classic dilemma which editors-in-chief face: whether to send a good reporter to cover a story he knows nothing about or a specialist reporter who can’t write good copy. Over and over again I found the editor’s role to be just as important as the journalist’s. As far as non-degree routes to journalism are concerned, I have observed the problem (if it is one) just sorts itself out. I’m not really sure that good journalism is subject which can be taught; a person either has an eye and ear for a good story or does not. In any event, the level of literacy required in most journalism is easily self-taught, should the practitioner really want to learn it. 6) What are the main challenges for freelance journalists? How could public policy better support them? The overwhelming challenge is financial. There are just so many bloggers and stringers out there willing to work for the fun or vanity of it that freelancers have a real struggle to make it pay. I’m not sure how public policy could better support them, or indeed if it should even try as it would probably make matters worse. 7) Why is the journalism profession not more representative of the population? How could this be addressed? I’m not really sure if what may be the premise behind this question is really valid. In all my years in the media I have never come across any discrimination at all based on any of the usual criteria; the only discrimination is if the person is any good or not. Having just spent a short and rather wonderful stay in a National Health hospital, it is true to report that the majority of staff are female and not white, but that doesn’t imply that white male nurses, for example, are discriminated against; it’s just that this category of people have chosen not to be nurses. In the same vein, sports journalism attracts predominately white males, but equally non-white females would have no barriers to entry should they choose to practice that part of journalism. How could this be addressed? Leave well alone, let people sort themselves out and don’t go looking for problems where none exist. 8) Why has trust in journalism declined? How could it be improved? How can journalists better understand and convey the concerns and priorities of people who do not live in London or other metropolitan hubs? I think trust has only declined in tabloid journalism, where it was at such a low level anyway that I’m not sure it could have declined any further. The difference in standards seems to be related to the source of revenue, whether from advertising or subscription. In advertising it’s all about circulation numbers, now frequently expressed with clicks as much as display or classified advertising, and low standards are only getting lower. The subscription model on the other hand demands high standards of work and trust, otherwise the model fails. Interestingly, The Spectator’s circulation is at an all time high, proving that quality sells in spite of all fears to the contrary. Provincial or regional journalism is becoming increasingly hard to sustain financially and it’s hard to think of a solution, beyond subsidies which are themselves fraught with the law of unintended consequences, to the problem. 9) How can innovation and collaboration help news providers of all types to maintain sustainable business models and adapt what they produce to audience demand? What lessons can be learnt from successful innovations, including in other countries? The answer has to be in subscription models which are self-financing and self-policing, editorially. It’s also the only viable future for the BBC, but that’s a whole different question. 10) Are there any other ways in which public policy could better support journalists and news organisations, now and in the future? Are there examples from other countries from which the Government could learn? Public policy must be firmly in support of free speech, which is under threat from the new form of McCarthyism which seeks to stifle any individual or media outlet who disagrees with the liberal-left orthodoxy. The ‘cancel culture’ and the accompanying Twitter-mob witch hunts of anyone expressing an opinion that isn’t recognisably ‘woke’ is an ever-growing threat to not just free speech but free thought as well. The police in particular must be immediately discouraged from pursuing thought crimes. 23 February 2020.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • People-Based Advertising
    Market Data / Supplier Selection / Event Presentations / User Experience Benchmarking / Best Practice / Template Files / Trends & Innovation Ô People-Based Advertising Evaluating the impact and future of addressable media In partnership with Signal North American Edition In partnership with Signal Published April 2016 Econsultancy London Econsultancy New York Econsultancy Singapore 4th Floor, Wells Point 350 7th Avenue, Suite 307 20 Collyer Quay 79 Wells Street New York, NY 10001 #23-01 London W1T 3QN United States Singapore All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be United Kingdom 049319 reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, Telephone: electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording Telephone: +1 212 971 0630 Telephone: or any information storage and retrieval system, without +44 207 269 1450 +65 6653 1911 prior permission in writing from the publisher. http://econsultancy.com Copyright © Econsultancy.com Ltd 2016 [email protected] Contents Executive Summary .............................................................. 4 Foreword by Signal ............................................................... 6 About Signal ............................................................................................ 7 About Econsultancy ................................................................................. 7 Methodology .......................................................................... 8 In context: data-driven display advertising .......................... 9 Addressable media or
    [Show full text]
  • All the News That's Fit to Click: the Economics of Clickbait Media
    Political Communication ISSN: 1058-4609 (Print) 1091-7675 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/upcp20 All the News That’s Fit to Click: The Economics of Clickbait Media Kevin Munger To cite this article: Kevin Munger (2020) All the News That’s Fit to Click: The Economics of Clickbait Media, Political Communication, 37:3, 376-397, DOI: 10.1080/10584609.2019.1687626 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1687626 Published online: 03 Dec 2019. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 920 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 1 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=upcp20 Political Communication, 37:376–397, 2020 Copyright © 2019 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1058-4609 print / 1091-7675 online DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2019.1687626 All the News That’s Fit to Click: The Economics of Clickbait Media KEVIN MUNGER The news media industry has changed as the internet and social media have matured and become integral to modern life. I describe these changes through a theoretical analysis of the economic structure of the industry and explore the implications for scholars of online media and politics. The crux of my argument is that social media simultaneously serves as a distribution platform and reputation builder, as social recommendations take the place of expensive investments in high-quality journalism. This development rendered crucial portions of previous models of the market for news inaccurate due to the declining importance of firm reputation.
    [Show full text]
  • Digital Influence Warfare in the Age of Social Media
    Digital Influence Warfare in the Age of Social Media JAMES J. F. FOREST Praeger Security International A6038C_Forest_Digital Influence Warfare.indb 3 12/05/21 8:11 PM Copyright © 2021 by James J. F. Forest All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Forest, James J. F., author. Title: Digital influence warfare in the age of social media / James J.F. Forest. Description: Santa Barbara, California : Praeger, An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC, [2021] | Series: Praeger security international | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020054801 (print) | LCCN 2020054802 (ebook) | ISBN 9781440870095 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781440870101 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Information warfare. | Social media—Political aspects. | Disinformation. | Mass media and propaganda. | Mass media and public opinion. Classification: LCC UB275 .F67 2021 (print) | LCC UB275 (ebook) | DDC 355.3/437—dc23 LC record available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2020054801 LC ebook record available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2020054802 ISBN: 978-1-4408-7009-5 (print) 978-1-4408-7010-1 (ebook) 25 24 23 22 21 1 2 3 4 5 This book is also available as an eBook. Praeger An Imprint of ABC-CLIO, LLC ABC-CLIO, LLC 147 Castilian Drive Santa Barbara, California 93117 www . abc - clio . com This book is printed on acid-free paper Manufactured in the United States of America A6038C_Forest_Digital Influence Warfare.indb 4 12/05/21 8:11 PM Contents Preface vii Acknowledgments xiii 1.
    [Show full text]
  • False, Misleading, Clickbait-Y, And/Or Satirical “News” Sources
    False, Misleading, Clickbait-y, and/or Satirical “News” Sources Tips for analyzing news sources: ● Avoid websites that end in “lo” ex: Newslo. These sites take pieces of accurate information and then packaging that information with other false or misleading “facts” (sometimes for the purposes of satire or comedy). ● Watch out for common news websites that end in “.com.co” as they are often fake versions of real news sources (remember: this is also the domain for Colombia!) ● Watch out if known/reputable news sites are not also reporting on the story. Sometimes lack of coverage is the result of corporate media bias and other factors, but there should typically be more than one source reporting on a topic or event. ● Odd domain names generally equal odd and rarely truthful news. ● Lack of author attribution may, but not always, signify that the news story is suspect and requires verification. ● Some news organizations are also letting bloggers post under the banner of particular news brands; however, many of these posts do not go through the same editing process (ex: BuzzFeed Community Posts, Kinja blogs, Forbes blogs). ​ ​ ● Check the “About Us” tab on websites or look up the website on Snopes or Wikipedia for more information about the source. ● Bad web design and use of ALL CAPS can also be a sign that the source you’re looking at should be verified and/or read in conjunction with other sources. ● If the story makes you REALLY ANGRY it’s probably a good idea to keep reading about the topic via other sources to make sure the story you read wasn’t purposefully trying to make you angry (with potentially misleading or false information) in order to generate shares and ad revenue.
    [Show full text]
  • The Good, the Bad and the Bait: Detecting and Characterizing Clickbait on Youtube
    The Good, the Bad and the Bait: Detecting and Characterizing Clickbait on YouTube Savvas Zannettou, Sotirios Chatzis, Kostantinos Papadamou, Michael Sirivianos Department of Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering and Informatics Cyprus University of Technology Limassol, Cyprus [email protected], {sotirios.chatzis,michael.sirivianos}@cut.ac.cy, [email protected] Abstract—The use of deceptive techniques in user-generated video portals is ubiquitous. Unscrupulous uploaders deliberately mislabel video descriptors aiming at increasing their views and subsequently their ad revenue. This problem, usually referred to as "clickbait," may severely undermine user experience. In this work, we study the clickbait problem on YouTube by collecting metadata for 206k videos. To address it, we devise a deep learning model based on variational autoencoders that supports Fig. 1: Comments that were found in clickbait videos. The users’ the diverse modalities of data that videos include. The proposed frustration is apparent (we omit users’ names for ethical reasons). model relies on a limited amount of manually labeled data to classify a large corpus of unlabeled data. Our evaluation indicates that the proposed model offers improved performance when usually contains hidden false or ambiguous information that compared to other conventional models. Our analysis of the collected data indicates that YouTube recommendation engine users or systems might not be able to perceive. does not take into account clickbait. Thus, it is susceptible to Recently, the aggravation of the fake news problem has recommending misleading videos to users. induced broader public attention to the clickbait problem. For instance, Facebook aims at removing clickbaits from its I.
    [Show full text]
  • Perceptions of Clickbait: a Q-Methodology Approach Yimin Chen Western University, [email protected]
    CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Scholarship@Western Western University Scholarship@Western FIMS Presentations Information & Media Studies (FIMS) Faculty 2017 Perceptions of Clickbait: A Q-Methodology Approach Yimin Chen Western University, [email protected] Victoria L. Rubin Western University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fimspres Part of the Library and Information Science Commons Citation of this paper: Chen, Y. and Rubin V. L. (2017). Perceptions of Clickbait: A Q-Methodology Approach. In the Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of The aC nadian Association for Information Science/L’Association canadienne des sciences de l’information (CAIS/ ACSI2017), Ryerson University, Toronto, May 31 - June 2, 2017 [Citation: Chen, Y. and Rubin V. L. (2017). Perceptions of Clickbait: A Q-Methodology Approach. In the Proceedings of the 45th Annual Conference of The Canadian Association for Information Science/L’Association canadienne des sciences de l’information (CAIS/ACSI2017), Ryerson University, Toronto, May 31 - June 2, 2017.] Perceptions of Clickbait: A Q-Methodology Approach Yimin Chen and Victoria L. Rubin Language and Information Technology Laboratory (LiT.RL) Faculty of Information and Media Studies University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, CANADA [email protected], [email protected] Keywords Clickbait, reader behavior, Q methodology, news, digital literacy. INTRODUCTION Clickbait is “content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page” (“clickbait,” n.d.). The term is also generally used to refer specifically to the attention-grabbing headlines. Critics of clickbait argue that clickbait is shallow, misleading, and ubiquitous – “a new word that has become synonymous with online journalism” (Frampton, 2015).
    [Show full text]
  • Two Graduate Students Wrote About Stupid Internet Stuff and Got Away with It! (Page 10 Will Blow Your Mind!)
    Online Journal of Communication and Media Technologies, 2018, 8(4), 293-307 Amazing! Two Graduate Students Wrote About Stupid Internet Stuff and Got Away with It! (Page 10 Will Blow Your Mind!) Zachary Sheldon, M.A. Texas A&M University, USA 0000-0003-3812-2882 [email protected] Max Romanowski, M.A. Baylor University, USA 0000-0002-5159-9370 [email protected] ARTICLE INFO Received: 28 August 2018 Accepted: 25 October 2018 Published: 12 November 2018 DOI: https://doi.org/10.12973/ojcmt/3953 ABSTRACT This article examines new forms of narrative in the internet age through examining the website ClickHole. Through parodying and satirizing sites like BuzzFeed, ClickHole (an offshoot of the famous parody entity The Onion) thrives on the creation and dissemination of absurd headlines and accompanying stories. These not only commenting widely on cultural obsessions with things like pop culture figures and social causes, but also point to an innovative take on the place and form of narrative in the age of the internet. Keywords: ClickHole, BuzzFeed, internet culture, satire, new media, storytelling INTRODUCTION Founded in 2014 as an offshoot of popular satire The Onion, ClickHole is a “website with content unabashedly meant to pander, mislead and ultimately go viral” (Greenberg, 2014). Begun as The Onion was ceasing its print publication, ClickHole is a phenomenon entirely of the internet, created to comment on “the viral, click bait culture that’s made BuzzFeed and Upworthy thrive” (Greenberg, 2014). But the site has not just stopped there. Though initially conceived as an explicit parody and satire of the headlines and stories found on sites like BuzzFeed, ClickHole has evolved to stand on its own as a unique, pure artifact of internet culture.
    [Show full text]
  • Download Preprint
    Native advertising and the credibility of online publishers Manon Revel, Amir Tohidi Institute for Data, Systems and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, [email protected], [email protected] Dean Eckles Sloan School of Management, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139 [email protected] Adam Berinsky Department of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, [email protected] Ali Jadbabaie Institute for Data, Systems and Society, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, Civil Engineering Department, Cambridge, MA 02139, [email protected] The digitization of news publishing has resulted in new ways for advertisers to reach readers, including additional native advertising formats that blend in with news. However, native ads may redirect attention off-site and affect the readers' impression of the publishers. Using a combination of observations of ad content across many publishers and two large randomized experiments, we investigate the characteristics of a pervasive native ad format and compare the impact of different native ads characteristics on perceived news credibility. Analyzing 1.4 million collected ad headlines, we found that over 80% of these ad headlines use a clickbait-style and that politics is among the most common topics in ads. In two randomized experiments (combined n=9,807), we varied the style and content of native ads embedded in news articles and asked people to assess the articles' credibility. Experiment 1 (n=4,767) suggested that different publishers were impacted differently by the ads and motivated the more detailed design of Experiment 2 (n=5,040). This latter experiment used hundreds of unique combinations of ads, articles, and publishers to study effects of clickbait and political ads.
    [Show full text]
  • Fake News Early Detection: an Interdisciplinary Study
    Fake News Early Detection: An Interdisciplinary Study XINYI ZHOU, ATISHAY JAIN, VIR V. PHOHA, and REZA ZAFARANI, Syracuse University, USA Massive dissemination of fake news and its potential to erode democracy has increased the demand for accurate fake news detection. Recent advancements in this area have proposed novel techniques that aim to detect fake news by exploring how it propagates on social networks. Nevertheless, to detect fake news at an early stage, i.e., when it is published on a news outlet but not yet spread on social media, one cannot rely on news propagation information as it does not exist. Hence, there is a strong need to develop approaches that can detect fake news by focusing on news content. In this paper, a theory-driven model is proposed for fake news detection. The method investigates news content at various levels: lexicon-level, syntax-level, semantic-level and discourse-level. We represent news at each level, relying on well-established theories in social and forensic psychology. Fake news detection is then conducted within a supervised machine learning framework. As an interdisciplinary research, our work explores potential fake news patterns, enhances the interpretability in fake news feature engineering, and studies the relationships among fake news, deception/disinformation, and clickbaits. Experiments conducted on two real-world datasets indicate the proposed method can outperform the state-of-the-art and enable fake news early detection when there is limited content information. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing theory, con- cepts and paradigms; • Computing methodologies → Natural language processing; Machine learn- ing; • Security and privacy → Social aspects of security and privacy; • Applied computing → Sociology; Computer forensics.
    [Show full text]
  • Feeding Our Identities:Buzzfeed Quizzes As a Tool for Personal Identification in the Social Digital Age Sarah M
    Roger Williams University DOCS@RWU Communication & Media Studies Theses Feinstein College of Arts and Sciences Theses 2017 Feeding our Identities:BuzzFeed Quizzes as a Tool for Personal Identification in the Social Digital Age Sarah M. Quinn Roger Williams University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://docs.rwu.edu/communication_theses Part of the Communication Commons Recommended Citation Quinn, Sarah M., "Feeding our Identities:BuzzFeed Quizzes as a Tool for Personal Identification in the Social Digital Age" (2017). Communication & Media Studies Theses. 1. http://docs.rwu.edu/communication_theses/1 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Feinstein College of Arts and Sciences Theses at DOCS@RWU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Communication & Media Studies Theses by an authorized administrator of DOCS@RWU. For more information, please contact [email protected]. COMM 432.02: Special Topics: Research Thesis Feeding our Identities: BuzzFeed Quizzes as a Tool for Personal Identification in the Social Digital Age Sarah M. Quinn Bachelor of Arts in Communication & Media Studies Roger Williams University Department of Communication & Graphic Design Final Research Thesis, Dr. Anjali Ram May 18th, 2017 2 Abstract Specializing in “listicle” media and personality identification quizzes, BuzzFeed is enormously popular among college students. Audiences apply the identities they are ascribed through Buzzfeed quizzes to inform their communication within a discourse community, and as individual expression. This paper examines college students’ discourse that surrounds their use of BuzzFeed identity quizzes. The goal of this study is to understand how the consumption of these quizzes constructs personal identities and informs the communication of these identities.
    [Show full text]
  • Disinformation Overdose a Study of the Crisis of Trust Among Vaccine Sceptics and Anti-Vaxxers
    Disinformation Overdose A study of the Crisis of Trust among Vaccine Sceptics and Anti-Vaxxers Hannah Winter, Lea Gerster, Joschua Helmer & Till Baaken Beirut Berlin London Paris Washington DC Copyright © Institute for Strategic Dialogue (2021). Institute for Strategic Dialogue gGmbH is registered with the Local Court of Berlin-Charlottenburg (HRB 207 328B). The Executive Director is Huberta von Voss. The address is: PO Box 80647, 10006 Berlin. All rights reserved. www.isdglobal.org Authors Acknowledgements Hannah Winter This report forms part of a research project on vaccine Hannah Winter works for ISD as an analyst specialising disinformation which was supported financially by the in digital research, and investigates the emergence Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF). ISD Germany and spread of disinformation, conspiracy theories and is solely responsible for the content. extremist ideologies in social networks. As a member of the ISD Election Monitoring Unit, she researches The report was written with the help of Francesca political communication online, disinformation Arcostanzo, Pierre Vaux, Henry Tuck, Jeremy Reffin, campaigns and attempts to influence elections. Carl Miller, Nicolás Heyden, Paula Matlach and Chloe She is co-author of the ISD research report “Battle Colliver. It was edited by Paul Ostwald. The authors for Bavaria”. would also like to thank those interviewed for their trust, openness and willingness to engage. Lea Gerster Lea Gerster works for ISD as an analyst, focusing on Note on links the spread of extremist ideologies, disinformation and conspiracy theories in German-speaking and There are several ethical risks associated with the English-speaking countries. She previously spent inclusion of direct links to channels and content two years working with think tanks and consultancy promoting extremism and conspiracy theories.
    [Show full text]
  • Extended Abstract: Don't Take the Bait: Users' Engagement with Clickbait
    Extended Abstract: Don't Take the Bait: Users’ Engagement with Clickbait and Its Effect on Editorial Considerations The content overflow characterizing the information environment on social network sites (SNS) demands that news publishers compete for audience attention. As part of this competition, several tactics have been adopted by news editors (Molyneux & Coddington, 2020). Prominent among them is the clickbait headline (Bazaco, 2019; Beleslin et al., 2017; Mukherjee et al., 2019; Orosa, 2017). According to the Oxford English Dictionary, clickbait headlines are “(On the Internet) content whose main purpose is to attract attention and encourage visitors to click on a link to a particular web page,” (“Clickbait” in Oxford English Dictionary, n.d), usually by using catchy, exaggerated, exciting, and sensational headlines, in order to maintain and exploit users’ curiosity gap (Thiel, 2018). There is evidence that clickbait’s use of attention-grabbing headlines does successfully entice visitors to click on links (Zhang et al., 2019). However, this practice is coming under increasing criticism from journalists, scholars and users. Journalists and scholars claim that clickbait headlines lead to the “death of journalism” (Dvorkin, 2016), as their only aim is to attract audiences towards vacuous texts, which has a negative effect on media quality and on public information norms and standards (Bazaco, 2019; Cable & Mottershead, 2018; Thurman & Myllylahti, 2009). Users equally dislike clickbait and find it deceptive (Beleslin et al., 2017; Chakraborty et al., 2016; Scacco & Muddiman, 2016). Furthermore, clickbait affects the public image and credibility of outlets who use them (Chakraborty et al., 2016; Molyneux & Coddington, 2020; Vultee et al., 2020).
    [Show full text]